Denver startup Whimsical has been building integrated tools to enable the future of remote work since it launched in 2017.
Now, as companies around the globe settle into a dispersed employee model, Whimsical has seen the interest in its product explode and has brought on its first outside capital to accelerate its growth.
This week, Whimsical announced that it has raised $30M in Series A funding led by Accel, with participation of Basis Set Ventures. It also received angel investments from GitHub’s CEO and chief operation officer, Stripe’s chief procurement officer, Dropbox’s co-founder, and others.
Whimsical had been growing quietly and was bootstrapped since its founding, Co-Founder and CEO Kaspars Dancis told Denver Business Journal. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the company saw a rapid adoption of the technologies it was creating as customers sought ways to transition to a work-from-home model.
Whimsical’s technology brings together what they call “primitives,” or standard office tools, into a single integrated platform. The company offers tools like flowcharts, wireframes, mind maps, sticky notes and documents.
The key difference between Whimsical’s products is that they’re designed to work asynchronously, Dancis said. Meaning, you can still collaborate with your colleagues in a way that feels effective, even if you are five time zones away.
“Back then we already thought distributed work would be the default. We couldn’t imagine in 2017 that it would happen so fast and here we are today,” Dancis said. “That is the biggest reason we decided to raise this funding. We saw that work is changing so fast and we need to accelerate our vision and make sure we have enough resources to build what we want to build.”
With this capital, Whimsical will continue building out its product portfolio and growing its team, specifically in sales and marketing efforts. To this point, the company has built its customer base largely on word of mouth.
“As we take the company into the next phase, we want to build out this go-to market team to reach more businesses,” Dancis said. Whimiscal’s current customers include U.K.-based food delivery platform Deliveroo, website building company Webflow and B2B marketing video host Wistia.
The dispersed company is split between the U.S. and Europe with nearly 20 employees total, and Dancis expects to double that number in the next 12 months.
As companies weigh what the future of remote work looks like, Dancis said the key is not to attempt to emulate what physical work looked like. Rather, he advocates for creating a separate workspace that prioritizes and highlights the efficiencies of a dispersed team.
“We quite intentionally want to build more for that future, rather than imitate what’s happening in the physical world,” he said. “That’s where Whimsical shines, it serves as this hub where the asynchronous work comes together and moves forward.”
And on hybrid work models, Dancis doesn’t see the long-term benefit for companies or employees. He thinks that a hybrid workspace saps the benefits of remote work, including global hiring opportunities, and creates an inefficient workspace.
“I see this hybrid model over the long term not working out,” he said.
